1 Introduction

In this study we analyzing education material produced by the Swedish Civil Protection Agency to be used by teacher in elementary school to educate child about information security problems and solutions. In particular, two aspect of the educational material were studied. The first aspect was what are the success factors for the adoption and use of material and second aspect, was does different teachers’ transactional ego state correlates with the perception and use of a tuition material.

The lack of competence for information security within the Swedish society is agreed upon by several parties. Since children using the internet are getting younger and younger it’s of great importance that the schools start educating early to provide possibility for the children to be able to handle the information securely. In the curriculum for the Swedish elementary school information security is vaguely addressed which gives a large room for interpretation and there are no expressed requirements to educate in information security. Since the teaching time is valuable it is of great importance that the tuition material produced for the teachers is of high quality. The tuition material produced for the teachers can be perceived differently depending on the personality of the teacher, hence the aim with this study is to use the ego states from transactional analysis in order to investigate whether teachers’ different ego states affects how the tuition material is perceived, and if perception differs depending on the ego state of the teacher.

The basics of transactional analysis is that every person, which in our case that would be the teachers of the educational package designers and the students themselves belongs to a dominant ego state – Parent, Adult or Child. Communication is frictionless and effective when the parties transmitting the communication directs it towards the ego state the receiver is predominatelyin.

2 Terminology of Transaction Analysis

According to the transaction the founder, Eric Berne individuals can have communicate using the three different ego states - Parent, Adult and Child, as describe in Fig. 1 below:

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Parent like behavior to X to perceived as childlike.

Full size image

These ego states and behavior of an individual is driven by an order sets of their, beliefs, thoughts and feelings [1]. In Fig. 1 above we have to individuals 1 which has an order set of ES1 = {believes, thoughts, feelings} communicating and or transacting with individual 2 about or using a certain behavior X. This individual has an order set = {feeling, believes, thoughts}. The individual 1 is acting parent like and the individual 2 is perceives the behavior as being childlike.

These order set are dynamic and in some situations can change depending on a number of factors however, over time a dominate ordering of the set develops in and individual and can be characterized has have one dominate ego state of adult, parent, or child. It is this simplistic model this study aims to use - to examine participants’ dominant ego. Standard self-reporting questionnaires have been developed to determine an individual’s dominate ego state [2].

Figure 2 gives a rough schematic model over this type of communication between the main stakeholders in the socio-technical educational system in focus for this study. Here we see the groups or type of persons in the systems and the education material modeled a communication channel. When communication is transmitted to an ego state different from the one the receiver is in a conflict can occurs. Put in a context of a tuition material, the teacher is likely to react in a negative way if the tuition material is transmitting its information towards a different ego state than the teacher dominate state.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Socio-technical communication schematic

Full size image

3 Results and Conclusion

A web survey was published in two Facebook groups containing teacher profiles to collect data. The web survey contained an ego state questionnaire developed by Loffredo et al. [2] and a series of questions regarding the teacher’s opinions and use of the education material. Thirty-two teachers participated in the survey. How the material was perceived and how or if it was used was analyzed with t-tests, correlation- and regression analysis.

Figure 3 gives an overview of the relative strength of the correlations observed between measured variables. In Fig. 2 ovals are used for descriptive variables, round rectangles for perceptions of the pedagogical material diamonds for actions that that teacher would take i.e. read more and or use the material.

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Significant variable correlation diagram

Full size image

The results show that there are significant correlations between ego state and how the material is perceived, where teachers having the dominant ego state Parent and Adult have a better opinion regarding the material than teachers having the dominant ego state Child. Also, Parent and Adult consider the material motivating while Child considers it authoritative.